The horrific story of the four innocent children thrown off the Dauphin Island Bridge by their father
holds a morbid grip on our community. So far, two of the innocent babies have been found.

My editor, Frances Coleman, wrote her Sunday column on how the big media is treating this tragedy...

Where were the big media in south Alabama?

Sunday, January 13, 2008

When Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba, they were there.

When six men were trapped in Utah's Crandall Canyon Mine, they were there, too.

And when Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub, the national news media were all over the scene in Houston.

But they were curiously absent from south Alabama last week as boaters and divers searched for the bodies of four young children whom police said were thrown from the top of the Dauphin Island bridge.

Police accused their father of killing them Monday by tossing them 100 feet into the waters of the Mississippi Sound.

The local newspaper and TV stations sent reporters and camera crews, and a Mobile-based Associated Press writer covered the story for the national wire service.

There was no sign of CNN or Fox News, however. Nor, apparently, did big-city papers like Atlanta, Dallas, New York or Washington cover the story in person.

What is it about certain atrocities that attracts television cameras while others -- equally if not more horrific -- do not?

During the coverage of Natalee Holloway's disappearance, some commentators and children's advocates insisted that the case received a disproportionate amount of news coverage simply because Holloway was a pretty, upper-middle-class white girl.

You'd hate to think that was the case, but if it was, then ethnicity could be strike one against the story of 3-year-old Ryan Phan, 2-year-old Hannah Luong, 1-year-old Lindsey Luong and 4-month old Danny Luong, born to parents of Asian descent.

Strike two could be that the children's father, Lam Luong, is a scruffy-looking loser -- a desperate crack addict who, according to relatives, "hit the kids all the time."

Even the murderous Andrea Yates, who drowned her five kids in their Houston home, was a more appealing villain. Apparently, postpartum psychosis trumps drug use and child abuse.

But here's what the Dauphin Island story is really missing: There are no relatives sobbing and pleading infront of a bank of cameras and microphones,

tugging at the heartstrings and tear ducts of the nation.

Those who did give interviews spoke in heavily accented English.

Strike three.

This is not to say that Lam Luong's family and friends care any less for their children than you or I care about ours.

However, they are part of

Mobile County's Vietnamese and Laotian communities, which were settled 30 years ago after the end of the Vietnam War. The communities are close-knit and inwardly focused.

Culturally, according to social workers, it is not their nature to reach out to strangers. When they have troubles, they turn to one another, not to TV cameras.

And so, last week CNN and Fox and the other national news outlets covered political campaigns, deadly tornadoes, the president's trip to the Middle East, and bodies found in a D.C. apartment.

Somehow, those events made for better pictures and sound bites than the story of the four little children in south Alabama.

The contrast says something about the news media and the criteria they employ to decide which stories they'll saturate with coverage and which ones they'll cover from a distance.

It says something about Americans, too, and how easily our interests and passions are manipulated by the media.

None of what it says about us or the media, I fear, is especially good.